“My point has always been that, ever since the Industrial Revolution, science fiction has been the most important genre there is.”
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Science fiction has its own history, its own legacy of what's been done, what's been superseded, what's so much part of the furniture it's practically part of the fabric now, what's become no more than a joke... and so on. It's just plain foolish, as well as comically arrogant, to ignore all this, to fail to do the most basic research.
Science fiction is trying to find alternative ways of looking at realities.
A lot of what the 'Culture' is about is a reaction to all the science fiction I was reading in my very early teens.
Torture is such a slippery slope as soon as you allow a society or any legal system to do that, almost instantly you get a situation where people are being tortured for very trivial reasons.
